publishing – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyondhttp://teleread.com
For lovers of books and gadgets. Est. 1995.Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:20:09 +0000enhourly198011808At rights management conference for digital era, publishing industry is still stuck in the pasthttp://teleread.com/at-rights-management-conference-for-digital-era-publishing-industry-is-still-stuck-in-the-past/
http://teleread.com/at-rights-management-conference-for-digital-era-publishing-industry-is-still-stuck-in-the-past/#commentsWed, 15 Jun 2016 15:26:32 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=165119Rights are more important than ever in the digital publishing world of today. In that respect, it’s not surprising there would be a conference devoted entirely to managing rights to digital media. On Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson summarizes a number of panels that took place there. I found the content of the panels as communicated in Porter’s summaries as interesting for what they implied as for what they said. First up was Authors Guild President Roxana Robinson, discussing the trouble authors are having getting paid when many of their titles are remaindered and end up competing with new copies on Amazon. “Publishers have high hopes for every book they make,

]]>Rights are more important than ever in the digital publishing world of today. In that respect, it’s not surprising there would be a conference devoted entirely to managing rights to digital media. On Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson summarizes a number of panels that took place there. I found the content of the panels as communicated in Porter’s summaries as interesting for what they implied as for what they said.

First up was Authors Guild President Roxana Robinson, discussing the trouble authors are having getting paid when many of their titles are remaindered and end up competing with new copies on Amazon. “Publishers have high hopes for every book they make, they make more copies than can sell,” Robinson explained, and sell those titles through middlemen who in turn sell them on Amazon—and the publisher’s contract permits them to do this without paying royalties to the author. So they do it, because they want money.

If Robinson had any harsher words for the publishers in attendance about this practice, Anderson didn’t report them. The odd thing, though, is that she even brings it up in the context of rights management issues in the new digital world, given that publishers have been remaindering books since before Amazon was even a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’s eye. I well remember going into Waldenbooks as a kid in the 1980s and finding remaindered tables there. Yes, sure, Amazon is digital, but it’s simply a continuation of those same non-digital bookstore practices. The only difference is now all the copies of each book are right next to each other, instead of being kept in separate parts of the store.

Then Randy Petway from Ingenta spoke, reminding publishers they need to take care of their authors or the authors will “step out of the business as a whole or they’ll find alternate channels, to be able to sustain an income.” They might even “[become] an adversary” if they feel publishers aren’t doing enough to protect their rights. Hence, publishers need to audit their rights portfolio and incorporate new rights-tracking technology to let their rights department be able to respond to queries “without the whole department coming to a screeching halt.”

Michael Healy, Executive Director of International Relations with Copyright Clearance Center, doesn’t seem to look too happily on various places around the world that are looking at broadening “fair use” protections in educational and library settings. He notes that, in Canada, licensing revenue has fallen from several million dollars a year to “almost zero” since Canada has adjusted its copyright licensing regime. Calling this the “Canadian flu,” Healy notes that it’s happening more and more frequently around the world.

In many of the challenges to copyright Healy sees, publishers simply aren’t considered legitimate rights-holders. “Taken in aggregate, these are serious situations,” he said, describing “multi-pronged assaults on copyright.”

HarperCollins Global Strategy Director Kerry Saretsky discussed the sort of careful planning and cooperation necessary to launch a book across multiple territories—using the Go Set a Watchman release, which required 18 different regional international teams, as an example.

Two of the tips that Kliemann provided: (1) Get past paper contracts if at all possible—it’s time for publishing to move to electronic signatures and digitally formatted contracts. (2) Watch for which titles in a backlist are getting permissions requests—those are clues to potential rights to be exploited.

I’d venture to suggest that “exploited” probably isn’t the best term to use there. It’s probably meant here as a neutral term describing making of the most of an opportunity, but the more familiar usage of the word means someone is profiting at the expense of someone else—and too many authors and readers feel that way about publishers already.

A few other interesting tidbits to come out of the conference:

Hollywood is now more interested than ever in licensing backlist works, given the advent of Netflix and Amazon as sources for original programming.

It can be tricky to promote literary writing online because you need millions of users to attract enough ad revenue. Patreon and Kickstarter can help bring revenue in.

Inkshares is another crowdsourced publisher (which we’ve previously covered here and here) which publishes books once they reach 250 pre-orders, with a 50% e-book and 70% print revenue share going to the author.

Getting digital music onto Spotify doesn’t mean a lot without the help of a label that can get songs onto its home page. Even then, the amount of revenue coming in will be tiny.

So, that’s that. It’s kind of a funny thing, but given that the conference was about rights management in a digital world, I didn’t see any mention, except implicitly, of DRM—which is commonly understood to mean “Digital Rights Management.” It’s too bad that this lack of mention probably just means everyone takes it for granted now.

As I already noted, it’s also funny that Roxana Robinson brings up the issue of remaindering in the context of something that’s an issue in the here and now. Not only is it not new, it absolutely should be an issue in the here-and-now, but not for the reasons Robinson represents. Remaindering is an artifact of a much earlier era, when publishers didn’t have any good way to estimate or count the number of sales that were being made, so they just had to take their best guess and accept that some waste was going to happen.

We have much better technology now. We should be able to forecast demand a lot better, and print a lot closer to the exact number of copies needed. With print-on-demand technology, some titles might not even need full print runs at all. If publishers were only willing to modernize their operations, they could put remainders dealers out of business by drying up their supply—and save a lot of warehouse space, to boot. Remainders could become a thing of the past—and for that matter, so could pulping returned books, another decades-old practice that is only wasting energy and helping contribute to global warming.

But publishers would need to modernize their warehousing operations, and recent events demonstrated those are still stuck in the past, too. When Amazon reduced the inventory of Hachette titles it kept on hand, Hachette proved not to be up to the task of getting new batches of books shipped out in a timely manner. Its warehouse system wasn’t up to keeping pace with demand, because it never had to before—Amazon and other distributors took care of that. But that sluggish response is also part and parcel of what’s keeping publishers stuck on printing more books than they need, then selling their overstocks to compete with themselves.

Randy Petway’s presentation does reflect the way publishers are coming to realize that self-publishing is a serious competitor, even if they don’t want to mention it by name. It’s funny, though, that he thinks authors are focused so intensely on their rights. Perhaps they are, but only because that’s a means to an end—the end of getting paid more money.

Michael Healy’s emphasis on fighting copyright reform, and his complaint that publishers aren’t considered legitimate rights-holders, seems to be another reflection of what’s wrong with the modern publishing industry. Of course publishers shouldn’t be considered rights-holders; they’re just rights borrowers. The author is the one who should hold the rights. But then, given the way many contracts assign the publisher the rights for the duration of copyright—for decades after the author passes away—many publishers seem to disagree. It’s hardly a surprise that publishers and their partisans would be upset that people might get more latitude in how they use copyrighted material, given that license fees are how they make their money.

As for Kerry Saretsky and Go Set a Watchman, yeah, it’s great that blockbuster titles get that kind of roll-out. But how much money do they spend pushing the books of Joe Random Midlist Author? “Oh hey, here’s a Facebook account. Go crazy with it!” And all this for a book that probably should never have been published in the first place! Maybe “exploit” is the right word after all.

Will big publishing ever change? Maybe, eventually, if it finds it can no longer survive without it. Until then, it’s still living several decades in the past and desperately trying to see and hear no evil.

]]>http://teleread.com/at-rights-management-conference-for-digital-era-publishing-industry-is-still-stuck-in-the-past/feed/3165119iBooks Editions: Too little, too late?http://teleread.com/ibooks-editions-too-little-too-late/
http://teleread.com/ibooks-editions-too-little-too-late/#commentsTue, 14 Jun 2016 09:20:25 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=165087Earlier today, I noted the complete absence of e-book-related announcements from the WWDC keynote. On The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder called my attention to an iBooks-related announcement elsewhere. iBooks is announcing a new romance novel imprint called “iBooks Editions,” which features novels incorporating “exclusive bonus material.” The e-books range from $3 to $5, and four of them are free. Clicking the link will fire up iTunes to the Editions page. The “bonus material” is stuff like additional scenes and epilogues that weren’t in the previously-published edition of the book. I downloaded one of the freebies, Maid for Love, and found a 24-page “Bonus Epilogue” listed in the table of contents.

The “bonus material” is stuff like additional scenes and epilogues that weren’t in the previously-published edition of the book. I downloaded one of the freebies, Maid for Love, and found a 24-page “Bonus Epilogue” listed in the table of contents. (Given that I haven’t and don’t plan to read the book, I have no idea how much said epilogue does or does not add. Perhaps voracious romance reader Joanna Cabot might take a look?)

Like Nate, and like Score Publishing CEO Bradley Metrock, I find myself extremely underwhelmed. This was the most that Apple could think to announce at WWDC concerning e-books? Adding bonus chapters to a few romance novels, which are already the hottest-selling category of e-books anyway? There are so many other categories of e-books that could use some love, too.

But even assuming this is just a pilot program and will soon be expanded to those other categories, the idea of republishing with bonus content isn’t exactly new. (Nor is it original to e-books. Just look at DVDs and Blu-rays!) If this is the best Apple can come up with to improve its moribund e-book market, Steve Jobs’s lack is being very sorely felt indeed. As Metrock puts it:

It is amazingly jarring to see Apple flail about, trying random things like this, while clearly lacking any sort of vision for where it wants to lead the market.

Even more bizarre is the realization that the same company doing exclusive deals for racy romance content, while eschewing educational content (or any other type of content at all), is the exact same company trying to grow its market share in America’s schools with iPads and Mac computers.

Given its generic nature, it’s not even a particularly brandable brand name. Google “iBooks Editions” and the top three links are about Harry Potter being published on iBooks. Because, after all, the edition of the book you publish through iBooks is its “iBooks edition.” When I did my usual Google Image Search to try to find a fitting image to accompany this story, I didn’t find anything relevant to the new romance imprint.

It’s not exactly surprising that this didn’t rate a mention in the two-hour keynote. It’s not the kind of improved functionality or new feature that was seen in every app or operating system they discussed. It’s a postscript. It’s hardly even worth mentioning, save that such a trivial improvement is the best thing Apple could come up with for what was formerly seen as one of the iPad’s great killer applications.

Nobody expects Apple to be able to go from zero to meaningful Amazon competitor in ten seconds—but if it was seriously planning to try, it would surely have more to announce than this. I stand by my earlier opinion that Apple simply doesn’t care about e-books anymore.

]]>http://teleread.com/ibooks-editions-too-little-too-late/feed/3165087Print + digital = a growing business in book bundling: Interview with Shelfie’s Peter Hudsonhttp://teleread.com/print-digital-a-growing-business-in-book-bundling-an-interview-with-peter-hudson-ceo-of-shelfie-com/
http://teleread.com/print-digital-a-growing-business-in-book-bundling-an-interview-with-peter-hudson-ceo-of-shelfie-com/#commentsSat, 11 Jun 2016 12:16:00 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=164816Peter Hudson, co-founder and CEO of BitLit Media, now known as Shelfie, has grown his startup book bundling firm significantly since I spoke with him last, in December of 2014. In this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview, Hudson said the number of publishers participating in Shelfie’s innovative pairing of purchased print books with discounted or free digital versions has risen to more than 1,400 compared with 220 just a year and a half ago. That includes three of the Big Five Publishers—Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette. The number of eBook titles buyable through Shelfie has risen from 80,000 to more than 400,000. That would cover a quarter of the books on an average reader’s personal

]]>Peter Hudson, co-founder and CEO of BitLit Media, now known as Shelfie, has grown his startup book bundling firm significantly since I spoke with him last, in December of 2014.

In this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview, Hudson said the number of publishers participating in Shelfie’s innovative pairing of purchased print books with discounted or free digital versions has risen to more than 1,400 compared with 220 just a year and a half ago. That includes three of the Big Five Publishers—Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette.

The number of eBook titles buyable through Shelfie has risen from 80,000 to more than 400,000. That would cover a quarter of the books on an average reader’s personal bookshelves.

I love Shelfie’s procedure of finding the eBooks I can get based on the physical books I own. You download a free Shelfie app to your iOS or Android device, and you use the app to take a photo of a row of your books. That’s called, you guessed it, “a shelfie”—thus the new name for the company.

The Shelfie app then figures out how many of your books are available as free or discounted eBooks from the publisher. A couple of clicks are all it takes to purchase the eBook. Et voila: you are a hybrid book reader, able to shift between print and digital versions of your book.

Depending on your eReader, things might not be that simple, though. Not all of the Shelfie eBooks are available in .mobi format, so you need to check that detail in order to read the eBook easily on your Kindle device or app. From my browsing of the platform, it seems as if ePub with Adobe DRM is the preferred format, but many books have both, as well as PDF.

I confess that I have my doubts about this hybrid book thing, because I have purchased and read only about three print books in the past seven years. But Peter assured me that lots of people like to switch back and forth, and his business growth seems to indicate he’s not hallucinating on this point.

Also in this week’s episode, I take a look at a fascinating speech Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave before the Association of American Publishers way back in 1999 .

Young Bezos, whose name was mispronounced by the AAP introducer—it’s BAY zohss, not BEE zohss, people—talked about being obsessed with customers, not competitors, so he was singing the same song as always.

What I loved is seeing how uncertain his delivery was and how disarming his enthusiasm was for the ride then just four years past the online launch of Amazon.com. He also seemed to receive a friendly, sort of indulgent reception from the publishers’ group. I wonder how many had any clue that 17 years later this goofy, gee-whiz Internet savant was going to completely upend their industry.

Next week I will finish my coverage of BookExpo America with more interviews from the floor of the exhibits hall. For episode 402 on June 25 my guest will be Jane Friedman, the legendary and savvy publishing pioneer who left her job as CEO of HarperCollins in 2010 to found the all-digital Open Road Integrated Media, where she is now chairman.

]]>http://teleread.com/print-digital-a-growing-business-in-book-bundling-an-interview-with-peter-hudson-ceo-of-shelfie-com/feed/1164816Unlike the Big Five publishers, Disney happily bundles digital media with physical goodshttp://teleread.com/unlike-the-big-five-publishers-disney-happily-bundles-digital-media-with-physical-goods/
http://teleread.com/unlike-the-big-five-publishers-disney-happily-bundles-digital-media-with-physical-goods/#commentsTue, 07 Jun 2016 22:00:02 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163650Today I noticed a way in which the Big 5 print publishers are falling behind some companies in the movie industry. Strange as it is to say about a company that’s done so much harm to the state of the public domain by championing copyright extension legislation, the exemplar in this case is actually Walt Disney. Today my copy of the Zootopia Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray arrived. The noteworthy thing here is that Disney movies come with a “Magic Code” that you use to redeem digital copies of the movie via Disney Movies Anywhere—much as with Ultraviolet copies of Blu-rays from other studios. But unlike most Ultraviolet copies, Disney Movies

]]>Today I noticed a way in which the Big 5 print publishers are falling behind some companies in the movie industry. Strange as it is to say about a company that’s done so much harm to the state of the public domain by championing copyright extension legislation, the exemplar in this case is actually Walt Disney.

Today my copy of the Zootopia Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray arrived. The noteworthy thing here is that Disney movies come with a “Magic Code” that you use to redeem digital copies of the movie via Disney Movies Anywhere—much as with Ultraviolet copies of Blu-rays from other studios. But unlike most Ultraviolet copies, Disney Movies Anywhere actually links your movie purchases to multiple other online streaming or download services: iTunes, Amazon Video, VUDU, Google Play, and Microsoft.

So, no matter whether you have an Android, iOS, Windows, or even an Amazon Fire device, you just buy a Disney DVD and you’ve got a streaming or downloadable copy of your movie in all those places. I just finished downloading a 1.9 GB high-definition copy of the movie to my Nexus 7 tablet, and it plays beautifully. I checked on my Fire, and the Amazon Instant Video app has it right there in My Library for streaming or device download. (The version of the video on Amazon is 3 hours, 37 minutes long, because it includes the feature plus all the featurettes and deleted scenes tagged on the end!)

All that, for just the cost of the Blu-ray. Which I also still have, in case all those streaming services should decide to shut down.

What if you bought a print book and automatically got the e-book for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Adobe ADEPT, and every other possible e-book provider, all at once? You certainly don’t when you buy a printed book, but that’s the equivalent to what Disney is doing here with its physical movie discs. If you tried to get the movie on all those different services without buying the disc, you’d have to buy it separately at each one—which would cost a lot more than just buying the Blu-ray once.

Disney’s far from the only studio that provides free digital copies, though it’s about the only one that provides them so freely in multiple formats. The only movies I have on my Microsoft account are Disney/Marvel titles that came from Movies Anywhere. My Google Play account has a few extras—a couple of my Ultraviolet titles were apparently also provided here, plus a couple of freebies Google gave me of its own volition. (I don’t even remember when or how I got the Sandra Bullock movie Gravity. I don’t own that one on disc.) Same for Amazon. Vudu has all my basic Ultraviolet stuff, which include the Disney Movies Anywhere titles plus a number of others—22 movies in all.

While these movies are all encumbered with DRM, they have down the basic trick of being useful enough that you hardly even notice the DRM that Amazon also has with its Kindle titles. And effectively all the different providers (with the possible exception of iTunes) allow you to stream these movies from the web or download them to your device for offline viewing.

It’s not even the only digital medium to do this. Amazon will “autorip” CDs you buy from them, giving you access to the music files before you even receive the disc.

But the Big Five publishers have historically been reluctant to go even a centimeter farther than they had to toward giving customers extra access to content. Back in the days of Fictionwise, the publishers wouldn’t even permit multi-format downloads of DRM-locked e-books from the same e-book store, because each format was considered a separate “edition” of the book, like paperback, hardcover, and so on, and had to be paid for separately! And that kind of perspective isn’t limited just to publishers. When Stephen King launched his digital serial The Plant, he insisted each separate download had to be bought separately, too. That probably helped contribute to the project’s “failure”.

Perhaps publishers and old-school authors are so used to thinking in terms of different editions selling separately that it handicaps them from seeing that they could add significant value to their physical media by bundling the digital media with it. For example, I will rarely buy Disney or Marvel movies used anymore, because I value getting the digital versions that come with the new discs so much. If I could get the e-book free with the print book, I might just start buying more print books. (Especially since they tend to cost less than the e-book version on Amazon. Some people already buy this way for CDs that cost less than buying the digital album by itself.)

What if there were a way to offer something like this for print-on-demand self-published titles? Buy the print-on-demand book and get a copy of the e-book free? Given that self-publishing folks might not be so keenly tied to the idea of charging separately for everything, it could provide even more reason for consumers to buy their books over the Big Five’s. It just remains for some company to figure out how to offer that service.

In any event, remaining stuck on separate formats like this can’t be helping the book industry compete with the movie industry for people’s eyeballs and people’s dollars. It just feels like you’re getting more when you buy a Disney Blu-ray. You don’t have to worry that it won’t work on whatever device you own or service you use, even if you switch up operating systems. All because Disney’s not hung up on forcing people to re-buy their media for multiple platforms.

]]>http://teleread.com/unlike-the-big-five-publishers-disney-happily-bundles-digital-media-with-physical-goods/feed/2163650May 2016 Author Earnings report paints more complete picture of self-publishing successhttp://teleread.com/may-2016-author-earnings-report-paints-more-complete-picture-of-self-publishing-success/
http://teleread.com/may-2016-author-earnings-report-paints-more-complete-picture-of-self-publishing-success/#commentsSat, 04 Jun 2016 09:30:23 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163362The latest Author Earnings report hit a few days ago, and it told some interesting tales—largely, the same tale over and over again. This time, recognizing some valid criticisms of prior methodologies, the Author Earnings crew expanded their crawl coverage to include far more titles than previous AE reports—crawling not just the bestseller lists, but expanding the crawl to also-bought recommendations and each author’s full catalog. This resulted in a million-title dataset, and the most thorough look at Amazon sales thus far—a full 82% of daily Amazon Kindle e-book sales. The only titles not included were the very lowest-selling titles on Amazon—mostly, titles that sold fewer than 1 copy per

]]>The latest Author Earnings report hit a few days ago, and it told some interesting tales—largely, the same tale over and over again. This time, recognizing some valid criticisms of prior methodologies, the Author Earnings crew expanded their crawl coverage to include far more titles than previous AE reports—crawling not just the bestseller lists, but expanding the crawl to also-bought recommendations and each author’s full catalog.

This resulted in a million-title dataset, and the most thorough look at Amazon sales thus far—a full 82% of daily Amazon Kindle e-book sales. The only titles not included were the very lowest-selling titles on Amazon—mostly, titles that sold fewer than 1 copy per month. They also included 900,000 top-selling print titles and 67,000 top-selling audiobook titles in their catalog, too. The report states:

This is thedefinitive studyof what authors from all publishing paths and all levels of sales success are earning right now from Amazon.com, the largest bookstore in the world.

It capturesa complete picture of Amazon author earnings — ebook, print, and audio sales combined— for every single author, traditionally published or indie, who is making any significant Amazon sales today whatsoever.

Author Earnings points out also that over 50% of traditionally-published and 85% of non-traditionally published book sales in the US in any format happen on Amazon.com. This becomes important for when it uses this fact to estimate total earnings for authors based on their Amazon sales.

The report opens with a series of sales charts showing the percentage of e-book unit sales, e-book gross dollar sales, and author earnings by publisher type from February 2014 through May 2016. The interesting thing they show is traditional publisher sales plummeting from 39% to 23% of Amazon unit sales over that time, and indie sales rising from rising from 27% to 44%. Gross dollar sales tell a similar story, though traditional publishers are still taking in 40% to indies’ 25% of gross dollar sales. The market share of author earnings looks about like the first chart, with indie authors earning 47% and trad-pub authors earning 22% by overall market share. I’m not sure how useful that author earnings chart really is, given that those earnings are derived at a second order by applying royalty formulas to the other results, but if the methodology is valid, it does serve to illustrate that indie authors are making more money overall.

It also seems they’re making more individually. Given that the report is named for “author earnings,” the charts segmenting authors across publisher types by the amount they earn makes up the majority of the report proper. These charts break authors up into those who debuted in the past century, in the past decade, in the past five years, or in the past three years. Then separate charts cover the number earning at least $10,000 per year, $25,000 per year, $50,000 per year, $100,000 per year, and $1,000,000 per year.

The interesting thing is how often these charts tell the same tale. For authors who debuted in the last century, the number of traditionally-published authors making a given amount of money ranges from nearly as many to considerably more than indie authors, as the income rate rises. But in every other category, the number of independent authors earning at a particular level consistently outstrips—usually far outstrips—the number of traditionally-published authors earning at that level. That’s true in effectively every one of the charts.

Another interesting finding was that it turned up a number of high-earning authors who didn’t show up on any best-seller list: 43 authors earn more than $100,000 per year (one of whom earns more than $250,000), 30 of whom (including the top earner) were indie self-pub. 142 authors (105 self-pub indie) were invisibly earning $50,000 or more. Most wrote in genres, especially romance, but there was “a traditional-award-winning indie writer of Literary Fiction” included, too.

All that being said, it’s important to consider what these statistics aren’t. They aren’t a guarantee that if you go into indie publishing right now, you’ll be an instant success, be able to quit your day job, and so on. The way some folks plug self-publishing, they might give you the idea that it’s the next best thing to a dead-certain get-rich-quick scheme. It’s not. Just because a few hundred or thousand indie authors are able to make a go of it, that doesn’t mean you’ll be one of the lucky ones. How many tens of thousands of authors are out there who don’t even make enough to buy themselves a nice steak dinner every now and then?

That being said, unless you can go back in time a few decades and get accepted by a traditional publisher, your odds of success are significantly greater now if you do self-publish—because considerably more self-published authors are making a given amount of money than traditional authors who started at the same time. And that’s even assuming you’re lucky enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher. You’re entering the lottery either way, but you get more tickets for the same amount of writing if you self-publish. Whether you manage to succeed is up to your skill as a writer and how good your luck is. That’s what these numbers say.

The unspoken assumption in assessments of the future of traditional publishing is that publishing will continue to capture the lion’s share of future bestselling authors. If that assumption is false, if most or all of the really talented authors avoid traditional publishers, the future of Big Publishing is bleaker than even the most pessimistic of the industry prognosticators’ public forecasts.

Of course, everyone has to make their own decisions about what way to go. If someone really doesn’t want to do the extra work of publishing their own works themselves, and a traditional publisher offers, it might be worth their while for non-economic reasons to go ahead and leave the driving to them. But it seems pretty clear that, unless the traditional publisher believes it has the next Harry Potter on its hands and will do its utmost to promote it that way, that author’s probably going to be leaving money on the table.

On the other hand, if a traditional publisher does want you, they’ll pay you an advance that you get to keep even if your book doesn’t sell that well. But even getting to that point with a traditional publisher is more than most aspiring authors can hope for—and advances these days for first-time authors tend to be pretty small.

It’s also worth considering that many traditional publishers are picking up self-published authors these days. (Case in point: Andy Weir, whose self-published smash hit The Martian subsequently got trad-published and became a smash hit motion picture.) Indeed, that might be the best reason to self-publish, even if you do want to go traditional—self-publishing a book and getting noticed for good sales will skirt the slushpile gatekeeper, and earn you a little money at the same time. It’s not like the old days, when “vanity publishing” was acknowledged as a scam, and posting your work on the Internet was assumed to be a guarantee that no publisher would ever want it.

Again, there’s no assurance of success no matter how you publish—especially considering how much competition for eyeballs there is now. But Author Earnings continues to suggest you’ve got a better chance going it alone—and that’s going to be a big problem for traditional publishers when it comes to staying afloat.

]]>http://teleread.com/may-2016-author-earnings-report-paints-more-complete-picture-of-self-publishing-success/feed/1163362Thanks to online retail, book covers are trending toward not-so-mellow yellowhttp://teleread.com/thanks-to-online-retail-book-covers-are-trending-toward-not-so-mellow-yellow/
http://teleread.com/thanks-to-online-retail-book-covers-are-trending-toward-not-so-mellow-yellow/#commentsFri, 03 Jun 2016 17:11:00 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163315As you shop for books and e-books online, have you been increasingly seeing yellow? There’s a reason for that. The Wall Street Journal reports that the reduction of covers to one-inch thumbnails in displays on online retail sites has driven publishers to something akin to desperation to make their books stand out from everyone else’s. Increasingly, the answer to how to do this involves the color yellow. Any bright color will catch the eye, of course, but yellow has a number of advantages. It’s a gender-neutral color with a variety of potential interpretations—it could signify warmth and happiness, or caution and hazard. It works with both bright and dark colored

Any bright color will catch the eye, of course, but yellow has a number of advantages. It’s a gender-neutral color with a variety of potential interpretations—it could signify warmth and happiness, or caution and hazard. It works with both bright and dark colored text and images, so it’s easy to swap in for a white background without having to change much else.

Added up, these factors make yellow book covers even more of a “sudden craze” than Donovan’s “electrical banana”. The only problem is, how do you stand out in a crowd of books all trying to stand out in exactly the same way? Who knows; maybe drab and boring colors will be the “very next phase.”

]]>http://teleread.com/thanks-to-online-retail-book-covers-are-trending-toward-not-so-mellow-yellow/feed/1163315How to manage your manuscript like a pro and earn morehttp://teleread.com/manage-manuscript-like-pro/
http://teleread.com/manage-manuscript-like-pro/#respondFri, 03 Jun 2016 16:30:18 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163279If you’re like most writers, your manuscript has grown from a tight, beautifully-told flight of imaginative fancy into a 600-page monster that no self-respecting editor would read: not even for a fortune. You probably couldn’t convince your own family to read it. But while you’re lagging behind, your bank account is dwindling, because you can’t get paid without publishing. What can you do to get back on track? If publishing is your business, then it’s time to start treating your manuscript like a project, and managing it just like any other activity that provides you income. Tried and tested ways can help condense the processes to publish. Many of them also decrease

]]>If you’re like most writers, your manuscript has grown from a tight, beautifully-told flight of imaginative fancy into a 600-page monster that no self-respecting editor would read: not even for a fortune. You probably couldn’t convince your own family to read it. But while you’re lagging behind, your bank account is dwindling, because you can’t get paid without publishing. What can you do to get back on track?

If publishing is your business, then it’s time to start treating your manuscript like a project, and managing it just like any other activity that provides you income. Tried and tested ways can help condense the processes to publish. Many of them also decrease your costs, too, and help make the entire ordeal less stressful and more rewarding to boot.

Below are several tips from editing pros to help authors, new and established, handle their manuscript more professionally.

Winnow down your word count

One of the biggest manuscript woes is simply having one that’s too long. Editors of all kinds charge either by the page or by the word, and the longer your manuscript is, the more you’re out of pocket. Critically evaluate your word count. If you’re over 70,000 words or maybe even at just that level, likely you’ve got one novel which just needs to be pared down. Overwriting is common, and if you’re using dozens of pages to write redundantly, you should cut them before ever going to an editor.

If you’re well over 70,000 words, consider finding reasonable points where you can break your manuscript into multiple novels. Sure, you might not have written it that way, but could you add a little here and there to turn your story into two books instead of one? Doing this will allow you to focus on part of your manuscript, publish, receive income, and then work on the following.

Manage your process

Often, there’s more to do than just shooting your manuscript off to editors. You need to manually prune and groom your manuscript once it’s complete, then send it to editors, write your cover copy, complete your revisions, complete a second round of editing. It can be a headache, and often there are elements which you can complete simultaneously. Use project management software like Clarizen or Pressbooks to help keep you on-task and aware of all the different moving parts of the publishing machinery. You’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll save with email reminders and schedules.

Formatting and style

Often the last part of editing your manuscript is formatting for publication. You can usually help reduce the time on this step by having suggested outlines and chapter breaks, and trying to write in your publisher’s recommended style and format. Have two different copies of your manuscript: one for print, and one with special e-reader formatting, as the two are often quite different. For example, e-reader formats usually have a linked table of contents, and have special advertorial sections at the end of the novel which can use html formatting. Taking advantage of those capabilities can help grow your readership and direct readers to your website.

The takeaway

The writing is often the easy part; it’s grooming the manuscript into something sensible and publication-worthy that gives writers anxiety and stress. But there are a few easy tips to help keep you on-task and under-budget when refining and polishing your manuscript.

Making certain that you’re not over-writing, and grooming your manuscript before turning it over to an editor can help you a great deal. Be open to the idea that you might need to break very long manuscripts into multiple novels. And also consider using apps or software to help manage your deadlines and pre-publishing processes, so that you can easily share collateral and keep track of what tasks have been completed…and which still need work. Formatting is usually the last element of readying a manuscript for a publisher, and should be broken down by file type, as often modern publishers need different formats for different venues.

(Clarizen sponsored the above post. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the TeleRead site. Image credit here.)

]]>http://teleread.com/manage-manuscript-like-pro/feed/0163279Hard copy still rocks – especially when it’s yourshttp://teleread.com/hard-copy-still-rocks-especially/
http://teleread.com/hard-copy-still-rocks-especially/#commentsWed, 01 Jun 2016 20:35:49 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=163198Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible, ladies and gentlemen – once I come down from Cloud Nine. My first collection of dark/weird/transgressive stories, Black Propaganda, just arrived in an attractive beige UPS package from Lulu, complete with cover design of (mostly) my own conception. I’ll be sharing more details of the publishing process soon, along with further updates on the e-book edition – including a potential title change. But for the moment, excuse me while I go celebrate a great piece of bookmaking…

]]>Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible, ladies and gentlemen – once I come down from Cloud Nine. My first collection of dark/weird/transgressive stories, Black Propaganda, just arrived in an attractive beige UPS package from Lulu, complete with cover design of (mostly) my own conception. I’ll be sharing more details of the publishing process soon, along with further updates on the e-book edition – including a potential title change. But for the moment, excuse me while I go celebrate a great piece of bookmaking…

]]>http://teleread.com/hard-copy-still-rocks-especially/feed/1163198Why isn’t the publishing industry trying as hard as the cable industry?http://teleread.com/why-isnt-the-publishing-industry-trying-as-hard-as-the-cable-industry/
http://teleread.com/why-isnt-the-publishing-industry-trying-as-hard-as-the-cable-industry/#commentsMon, 30 May 2016 09:47:55 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=162998Some posters went up in our building this week, shilling for the cable industry. I’m not sure just who, if anyone, authorized this in-building advertising. But you can feel the stink of desperation here as the monopolistic cable behemoth tries to lure back the cord-cutters: the posters aim to entice with a veritable smorgasbord of deals: free installation, free PVR boxes, even a $10 home phone line if only you sign up right now. So here is my question: why isn’t the publishing industry trying this hard? Every panicked news story coming from their camp suggests that e-book sales—at least, of the non-indie titles they track—are down, and unless you

]]>Some posters went up in our building this week, shilling for the cable industry. I’m not sure just who, if anyone, authorized this in-building advertising. But you can feel the stink of desperation here as the monopolistic cable behemoth tries to lure back the cord-cutters: the posters aim to entice with a veritable smorgasbord of deals: free installation, free PVR boxes, even a $10 home phone line if only you sign up right now.

So here is my question: why isn’t the publishing industry trying this hard? Every panicked news story coming from their camp suggests that e-book sales—at least, of the non-indie titles they track—are down, and unless you are publishing Harry Potter titles or adult coloring books, print sales aren’t exactly compensating. And how does Amazon respond to this? With a premium device which costs almost as much as an iPad.

So, why aren’t the publishers trying to woo me back? Why isn’t there a cheap non-Kindle they’ll practically give me if only I buy a certain number of books? Why aren’t they selling a subscription program on par with Kindle Unlimited—or even on par with an X-titles-a-month type of model like Scribd or Audible typically offers? Why aren’t they advertising promo samplers to me, like Tor does, or like Baen does? In other words, why aren’t they cowering in a stink of desperation like the cable people are?

I don’t know the answer. I don’t know why they are not. But I can’t help feeling like they should be, you know? I’d love to see what would happen to the appalling rate of adult leisure reading if the publishers tried half as hard as the cable company is.

]]>http://teleread.com/why-isnt-the-publishing-industry-trying-as-hard-as-the-cable-industry/feed/2162998Is Patreon the way to go for today’s authors?http://teleread.com/is-patreon-the-way-to-go-for-todays-authors/
http://teleread.com/is-patreon-the-way-to-go-for-todays-authors/#respondThu, 26 May 2016 16:03:15 +0000http://teleread.com/?p=162763BookRiot has an article by Teresa Preston looking at author N.K. Jemisin’s use of Patreon to support herself so she can quit her day job and write full-time. Patreon is a system whereby one’s fans can opt to contribute a set amount per month or per work in return for certain perks to be provided by the person receiving the contributions. Jemisin started out offering a monthly cat picture to people who pledged $1, those plus patron-only blog posts for $2 pledgers, a new short story per month to $5 pledgers, and so on. At the $50 monthly level (which had only 10 slots available, long since filled) she provides

Jemisin started out offering a monthly cat picture to people who pledged $1, those plus patron-only blog posts for $2 pledgers, a new short story per month to $5 pledgers, and so on. At the $50 monthly level (which had only 10 slots available, long since filled) she provides an author-signed copy of any new work she publishes in print while the backer is a patron. Since she cleared the $3,000 per month level, she’s provided access to all digital content and videos to all pledgers at all levels.

The system is effectively a perpetual crowdfunding campaign, which means rewards necessarily have to be something that can be renewed every month. However, the amount of time and effort required to create such rewards will presumably be considerably less than the amount required to hold down a full-time job, leaving that much extra left over for writing full-time.

At the time the article was first posted, Jemisin had raised over $3,800 per month in pledges from 664 backers, and now she’s up to nearly $4,200 with 735 backers—well beyond the $3,000 per month goal she set on the campaign. Meanwhile, Jemisin is not the only author trying this—Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, authors of the Liaden Universe novels, have their own Patreon campaign running, which is up to a respectable $1,913 per month from 277 patrons. Their Patreon doesn’t offer direct rewards (Lee and Miller already run their own site, Splinter Universe, where they provide obscure material free to everyone) but simply serves as a tip jar for long-time fans who want to kick in to help support their favorite authors—and $1,900 per month isn’t at all bad for that sort of offering. The Patreon has helped them afford to put in an emergency generator on their house so they can keep writing in case power fails during a harsh Maine winter.

A comment on the BookRiot article notes that author Seanan McGuire has a Patreon to cover a year of moving expenses, and Amanda Palmer has one, too. (Their Patreons run on a “per work” basis rather than a monthly basis, and the amounts they earn seem to dwarf both Jemisin’s and Lee and Miller’s campaigns, in fact.) I’ve also seen Patreons used by authors of webcomics, and I’ve even kicked in for one or two I especially liked. A lot of other artists have Patreons, too—indeed, so many artists do so that searching Google Images on “Patreon” to try to find a good picture for this article turned up a lot of results that would not be safe to view at work!

But can a Patreon work for just anybody? Preston doubts it. As with a crowdfunding campaign, you need to have a large number of fans who are willing to kick in and support you to get it off the ground. (Indeed, it might be a good idea to approach it exactly as you would a crowdfunding campaign, the way I mentioned in this post.) And if you want to make the equivalent of a good full-time salary out of it, like Jemisin, you have to put in the extra work to come up with monthly rewards and promote it.

But even the $22,000 or so per year Lee and Miller get from it has to be a big help in smoothing out their budget and covering expenses in between quarterly royalty checks—especially since they don’t have to put in a whole lot of extra work for it. (Which is good, because between Splinter Universe, their blogs, the Friends of Liad mailing list, and their Facebook pages, they’re already putting in a considerable amount of extra effort without getting paid anything.)

Given that their first publisher cut off their series early, and their next had trouble paying them reliably, Lee and Miller are no strangers to finding ways to earn extra money outside the traditional publishing system—in the 1990s and 2000s, they were an early independent publisher, selling printed chapbooks to fans via the Internet. They also ran a crowdfunding project for a pair of novels before Kickstarter was even a thing. You can put the success of these endeavors down to the devoted nature of Lee and Miller’s die-hard fans, and Patreon goes hand in hand with exactly that kind of fan devotion.

It’s tempting to note that most of these authors are traditionally-published and suggest that it’s the low royalty amount traditional publishing pays that makes midlist authors need to find these additional methods to earn a living. But then again, for all that folks like J.A. Konrath boost the earning potential of self-publishing, many self-published authors aren’t able to earn more than extra beer and steak money every now and then themselves. Whether you trad- or self-publish, you still run into the problem that you have to do reasonably well already, getting your name known to a significant number of people who like you enough to want to pay you, in order to be able to pick up enough fans for a Patreon from them to be able to help you.

And what will happen if popular authors start launching Patreon campaigns in droves? Will there be enough fans willing to contribute to enough authors that they can earn a living at it? Jemisin’s and Lee and Miller’s books sell at least tens of thousands of copies each, and probably into the hundreds of thousands in aggregate, but they’ve only got a few dozen or hundred Patreon fans and that’s enough to give them a decent amount of extra financial support. So, I suspect there’s still plenty of room for many Patreons to grow and flourish given how few contributors are required to each one to make a big difference in the recipient’s life.

When you get right down to it this basically works out to a way of actualizing the “1,000 true fans” theory that was all the rage on the Internet a few years ago and still gets the occasional bit of press even recently. Something like Patreon, where the fans chip in money to you directly, does seem to counter one of John Scalzi’s objections to the idea—that you don’t get all the money from fans who spend money on you. It may be hard to reach the goal of 1,000 true fans, but these Patreon campaigns show that even having a couple hundred of them can help a lot.